European universities: 16 French institutions selected in 2020

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During the 2nd call for projects to create European universities, the European Commission selected 24 programmes. This year, 14 projects engage 16 French institutions. European universities aim at fostering cooperation between European higher education institutions throughout organisations and in all training and research courses.

“Participate in a more united and stronger Europe, more open on the world, proud of its common values and gathering a new generation of Europeans” are some of the objectives of the European universities that the French president underlined in his speech at the Sorbonne university in September 2017.

European endowment and French endowment

This year, the European Commission reviewed 62 projects partnering over 380 institutions from 32 European States. Thanks to the quality of these projects, the Commission selected 24, among which 14 engage 16 French institutions. In total, the support of the Commission for all European universities will reach 287 million euros, including 120 million euros for the Erasmus+ programme. Additional 100 million euros are to be added to this endowment as part of the Programme français d'Investissements d'Avenir (PIA, French Programme for Investments of the Future) to allow French institutions to be supported financially.

Strong involvement in France

According to the French minister in charge of higher education, satisfied with this selection, this shows that “France is back with the main contributors to this new tool for European construction”. Considering the results of this first call for project, 32 French institutions are now engaged in 28 programmes. The minister also underlined that these alliance programmes, gathering institutions from at least three European countries, will begin their business at the start of the academic year 2020.

A new type of cooperation

The European Commission stresses the pioneer approach of this new cooperation at higher education level. For the Commission, European universities are “transnational alliances that will become the universities of tomorrow by promoting the European values and identity and completely revamp the quality and competitiveness of European higher education”. To achieve this “major progress”, the European Commission is testing various forms of cooperation, including the creation of a “European inter-university higher education campus” offering study programmes with student mobility at all levels.